COMUN PD1 & PD2

PD1

Over the course of COMUN we have 2 practice debates and the final debate. These are mainly to simulate what will happen during the actual debate and how to run it smoothly. Because of COVID  COMUN had to be moved to an online format instead of the traditional in person debate. This means that during the PD (practice debates) the Tech Team (Lithira, Johail, Andrew and I) would have a lot more responsibility and work as it would be more digital and we would have to set up and run the committees.  Our first problem that we encountered was within being able to keep zooms running for as long as the committees needed.  This was an issue as the chairs of the committees could not start up a zoom and keep it up for more than an hour. This is because of the fact that free Zoom accounts are unable to create Zoom’s for longer than a certain period of time.  Though we managed to combat this problem by using the 6 OSC Members within COMUN. There are 7 committees so everyone had to make one zoom and one person had to make two, because we made the accounts using OSC Zoom accounts they were able to stay up for as long as possible and they would not crash. This was a big achievement for the tech team as we had talked about using a different software or paying for a new one but instead we managed to persevere and use the resources we had at hand. After setting up the Zoom’s for my committee, Andrew and I decided to use the free time that we would use the rest of time to edit our committee videos. Overall we did not have any other faults within PD1 and it went smoothly and I managed to complete one of my committee videos whilst getting feedback on it at the same time.

PD2

The second practice debate which was about a month later was just to once  again simulate what the conference would look like. The conference as I said before would be conducted digitally and during the actual debate days there would be a cap of 30 people who are allowed to be at the conference. During PD2 the 30 people who are allowed to be at the conference would be there as to make a more accurate simulation than that of PD1. There would also be Admins who help head the committees with the chairs. There was no technical difficulties in PD2 apart from the fact that we had to create Breakout Rooms for the different committees . Other than that I would say that the PD2 ran smoother than PD1 as they’re was less bumps and it was just more cohesive overall.

Photos to be added.